Film Review: Love & Mercy

Love & Mercy (2014; Directed by Bill Pohlad)

A diptych-style two-eras biopic of the Beach Boys’ troubled genius Brian Wilson, Bill Pohlad’s Love & Mercy has some fine ideas, memorable images, a strong performance or two, and a clear concept of the points it wishes to make about Wilson’s life and work, or more accurately about the forces that stood in the way of him maximizing his outsized artistic potential and exacerbated his pre-existing and often-debilitating mental illness. But the film suffers debilitatingly from the relative weakness of the later and more dramatic of its twinned storylines, and doesn’t possess enough strength in the other narrative to compensate.

Love & Mercy casts two actors as Brian Wilson at two important junctures and crisis points in his life. Paul Dano plays Wilson at the peak of his creative powers in the mid-1960s, crafting the Beach Boys’ now-acclaimed classic album Pet Sounds and its contemporary hit single “Good Vibrations”, despite mounting, LSD-intensified mental problems as well as the criticism and doubts expressed concerning his artistic direction by his collaborators: his limited-vision ex-svengali father Murry (Bill Camp), and even many of his own bandmates, most infamously “one of the biggest assholes in the history of rock & roll”, Mike Love (Jake Abel), whose disdain for Pet Sounds‘ ambitious intended abstract-pop follow-up was purportedly a key factor in Wilson shelving the album indefinitely (he finally finished and released a latter-day recording of Smile in 2004, to great acclaim).

Intercut with the ’60s plotline is a thematically mirroring narrative of Wilson’s life in the 1980s, as a fragile, perma-dazed, but deeply sweet middle-aged Brian (John Cusack) meets car saleswoman and future wife Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), who intervenes to extricate him from the destructive, over-medicating, dictatorial controlling influence of his physician and legal guardian Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti). The ’80s storyline clearly reflects the ’60s one in its focus on the antagonistic male personalities holding Wilson back from getting what he wants: in the ’60s, they keep him from making the music he wants to make and from properly enjoying and profiting from his artistic creations, while in the ’80s, Dr. Landy keeps him from living a happy and free life.

Unfortunately, half of Love & Mercy is a drag on the other. The film is never better than when it has us watch and listen to enervating re-created snatches of the Pet Sounds recording sessions, as Wilson interacts with and conducts musicians while crafting one of the rock era’s pinnacle achievements. Even the interpersonal friction scenes work very well – Abel’s Mike Love makes a nicely dislikable Doubting Thomas, and when Brian tenderly plays a solo demo version of the overwhelmingly gorgeous “God Only Knows” for his father, Murry can only negatively observe that another act released a song by the same name years before – and the whole ’60s storyline is crafted with an inviting Hippie-era California rainbow lustre (Wes Anderson’s cinematographer Robert Yeoman handles the lens) that makes it a far more appealing setting to spend time in.

Meanwhile, the 1980s storyline appears more dried-out, sun-baked, tired, which certainly reflects the state of the older Wilson’s life but fills these scenes with a certain hazy discomfort that even Banks’ indomitable coastal-blonde sunshine cannot penetrate. Giamatti, who specializes in frumpy, hateable scumbags these days after a brief career interregnum of being allowed to convey some measure of empathy as well, contributes to this discomfort; to be fair, he should, given the role he is cast for, but watching him berate the near-helpless Wilson for the unspeakable crime of having a bite of a hamburger trespasses from artistic expressions of discomfort and abuse to pure audience alienation. Most vitally, while a filled-out Dano is a physical dead-ringer for the young Brian Wilson and nails his gradually-dawning mental disquiet and crippling anxiety, Cusack plays him as, well, a confused and brittle but sneakily endearing version of himself, which is far less interesting.

Pohlad (working from a script by Michael Alan Lerner and Oren Moverman) attempts to draw his parallel stories together in a bravado dream-montage sequence late in the film. Reflecting Brian Wilson’s fractured psyche and legendary habit of staying in bed all day during his most troubled personal episodes (which inspired a Canadian rock classic), Cusack, Dano, and the director’s son Oliver as Brian in boyhood are intercut lying in an ornate four-poster bed, with Murry, Dr. Landy, Melinda, and others standing at the foot of the bed and speaking to the prone figure. Interspersed, interrupted dialogue drones on the soundtrack alongside warping snatches of Beach Boys songs “In My Room” and “‘Til I Die”, as images of Brian’s childhood and band performances flash in and out. The scene is intended to weave together Love & Mercy‘s bifurcated narratives via the shared threads of their themes, but it’s a burst of technique from a different profile of film and it overloads this one. It does define Love & Mercy aptly as a bundle of strong ideas and well-built and -chosen elements that somehow unravels in final execution.